The Four Fingers of Death Book

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

So to understand why I found Rick Moody's newest novel so f-cking deplorable, it's important to understand that buried right in the middle of it is a really great, non-ironic science-fiction novel -- set in 2025, it's about a fully downfalling America trying for one last grab at greatness, by finally launching a fabled manned mission to Mars like George W. Bush announced in the years following 9/11; but the same things that have caused America's downfall also turn the mission into a complete disaster (badly designed hardware, ill-trained astronauts, corrupt supervisors, and a corporate mindset overseeing it all), making it a brilliant metaphorical look at what exactly is wrong with the US here in the 21st century, a short but powerful wallop of a book that would've easily garnered a Hugo win if released on its own. But unfortunately, Moody also includes an entire other half, an entire other 300-page cheesy horror tale about how the disconnected but fully alive arm of one of these astronauts (infected with alien bacteria!) makes it back to Earth and goes on a killing spree in the Arizona desert; then he adds this whole bit about how the entire story is supposed to be a novelization of a witty late-21st-century remake of a cheesy 1963 drive-in horror flick; and then he adds this ridiculously pointless introduction, intermission and coda about the guy actually writing this supposed novelization of the witty horror-flick remake, making the whole thing a snotty meta-meta-metafictional project about stories within stories within stories; and then on top of everything else, he writes the entire 700-page trainwreck in this overly cutesy, rambling academic style, a bad attempt at mimicking Kurt Vonnegut (in fact, the book is dedicated to him) that just utterly and completely fails, and that presents to us on a regular basis such unpleasantly postmodernist details as two-page-long single sentences and the like.

F-cking CHR-ST, Moody! Couldn't you have just written the admittedly great sci-fi tale in the middle and left well enough alone? Why is it that every big literary star of the 1990s has felt this uncontrollable urge in the 2000s to write giant, pointless, rambling, pretentious, genre-twisting pomo pieces of f-cking sh-t, of complete f-cking sh-t? (And yes, Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, I'm looking at all of you too. J'accuse!) Is someone slipping something into the Brooklyn water supply that turns all formerly great writers into endlessly digressing hacks? Whatever the case, I can't even begin to describe what a profound and monumental disappointment this book was; although like I said, I still recommend the tight and disturbing science-fiction novel that's buried in the middle of it, a great symbolic look at post-9/11 America that is unfortunately surrounded by 400 other pages of unreadable horsesh-t.

Out of 10: 4.4, but 8.8 for just pages 63 to 320